Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/60

 44 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

couragement, their backslidings and regenerations. An age of Pericles, an Elizabethan era, or the triumphant optimism of America, reveals the presence of such pervasive psychic phe- nomena, the rise of which the sociologist may investigate, and the conditions of which he may seek to point out.

Prevalent modes of psychic activity, whether they charac- terize periods or groups, or an element diffused through various populations, present sociological problems. Why is it that John Jones, the English farmer, hitches his horse to a cart so clumsy that it is a man's lift to raise the shafts, and the empty wain is half a load, packs in his load of dressing as carefully as if he were going to haul it around the world, and, having reached the field, does not dump it, but forks it out again, so that two to four loads a day is the limit of his speed; while Tom Jones, his brother, who emigrated to America, visiting at the old English home, watches John's waste of time and energy with nervous pain; for Tom in Kansas cuts his grain with a fourteen-foot cutter bar and reaps a hundred acres in a day? Why is it that the bricklayer in London lays seven hundred bricks a day, and the bricklayer in Chicago lays two thousand? Why is it that the baggage-smasher on the station platform in Boston tells the anxious passenger, who has failed to get his trunk onto the Fall River boat train, that there is no need to be troubled, as there is a later train, and the baggage-handler knows the exact hour and minute of its departure, and that at a certain minute in the night the train will reach a point where the Fall River boat stops, and that the steamer reaches the point enough later than the train so that the passenger and his baggage can connect with the steamer there? Now, this baggage-smasher may have immigrated from Germany a few years before, and whoever heard of a German porter knowing anything about connections ? The American bag- gage man knows the details of the business that come within the range of his observation, as if he expected sometime to be general superintendent. Moreover, he will act upon his information with- out orders, or even against orders, if he is sure there is sufficient reason, somewhat as if he were already general superintendent.

Professor Miinsterberg, in his book The Americans, avers